Luna Board membership in transition

Denise’s relationship with the organization spans decades: taking adult dance classes at Luna whenever she visited family in the Bay Area in her 20s, witnessing one of her children thrive and find his artistic voice in the children’s program, attending and volunteering at Luna fundraising events, and now as a board member. Denise recently retired from a long career as the director of civil rights compliance at the University of California, Berkeley. She now divides her time between consulting for higher education clients and artistic projects.

Malia focuses on effective early childhood practice at the Heising Simons Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation in 2018, Malia was with First 5 Alameda County, where she co-led the development and implementation of Quality Counts, the county’s quality rating and improvement system for early care and education. Her experience includes program evaluation, training and capacity building, and community advised grantmaking, with a focus on early childhood social emotional development and community-based school readiness. Malia received a master’s degree in social work and a master’s degree in public health from UC Berkeley. Her daughter, a teaching artist, studied with Luna in the Professional Learning programs.

MiHistoria.net is a storytelling platform that bears witness to the experiences of first-generation and immigrant Latinas, where Albertina facilitates workshops and curates their online archive. She also performs oral storytelling with Stagebridge Theater in Oakland and dances with the Elders Group of Destiny Arts Center. Born to a family of farm workers in Monterey, California, Albertina received a merit scholarship to attend Mills College, where she became student body president. She was a classroom teacher for over 20 years, a union representative for the Oakland Education Association, a mentor for Circulo de Espejos of the National Latina Health Organization, and a member of the Teacher Advisory Board of the Oakland Museum of California. Her other community service has included volunteering at Kaiser Hospital’s No One Dies Alone/Compassionate Care program and coaching for the Jack London Youth Soccer League. In 2013, Albertina was awarded a BAVC Media Maker Fellowship and was a participant in the Latino Producers Academy of NALIP. She currently leads storytelling workshops for La Clinica de la Raza’s Cultura y Bienestar Traditional Healing Program.

Tracy is passionate about K-12 education and the ongoing learning necessary for personal and professional transformation. She began her education career in 2012 at Anova Education working in special education classrooms. And for the past 14 years, she has supported professional development programs for teachers and administrators, beginning with K-12 book publishing (Jossey-Bass/Wiley) and continuing in her current role at CATDC. She supports educators throughout the state of California.

Jenny Chan joined Luna Dance & Creativity as a board member in 2022 and is on Luna’s capital campaign committee. Jenny is a first-generation immigrant from Hong Kong who lived in South Berkeley between 2015-2020 before moving to neighboring Oakland. She has worked as a grant writer with Boat People SOS in Houston and as a program associate with van Löben Sels/RembeRock Foundation in San Francisco. She is also a studio volunteer with Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland. She recently made a career pivot toward visual arts and is determinedly pursuing a BFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Luna’s newest board member Julia Zolinsky is currently the Senior Director of Development & Corporate Partnerships for the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. In this role Julia oversees industry partnerships for the college, developing fundraising strategy and raising millions of dollars annually for student programs, scholarships and fellowships, faculty research, and new initiatives. Julia has also been a champion for the college’s diversity initiatives, working closely with program staff to secure critical funds for activities supporting underrepresented students. Prior to UC Berkeley, Julia B.A. in Sociology from UCLA and spent 15 years working in fundraising and corporate relations for museums and nonprofits in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. She is a Bay Area native and currently lives in Oakland with her husband and son.

Carina Ho is a musical and dance artist that creates work under the moniker ONIKHO. A multi-instrumentalist and composer, she creates music and dance works that celebrate disabled bodies. Additionally, she specializes in accessibility and inclusion at Airbnb, where her work focuses on making travel more inclusive. Finally, she is a children’s book author and published her first book, Mighty Mara, in 2022.

Ruth was born in Sinaloa, Mexico, and immigrated to the United States at the age of 26. She started working in Spanish Television in Los Angeles in 1996. In 2001, Ruth began teaching in LAUSD as a general classroom teacher. In 2006, She became an elementary dance teacher servicing over 120 schools in a period of 8 years. In 2014 Ruth became the Arts Integration Specialist in Local District South. In 2018, she started supervising the LAUS dance department overseeing 517 elementary schools and 60 dance teachers. In 2021, Ruth moved to a school site as an Elementary Assistant Principal for Special Education. In July 2024 she became a Principal at Olympic Primary Center in Downtown LA. She’s worked for LAUSD in different capacities for 23 years.

Dr. Sofia Fojas is a leader for cultural equity and social justice in the arts.  She was born in Honolulu, where she learned to dance the hula and play the ukulele in elementary school. A classroom music teacher for 20 years, she taught orchestra, band, IB Music, and mariachi. She has also worked for the Mexican Heritage Corporation and the Los Cenzontles Mexican Arts Center. In 2008, Ms. Fojas was in the first class of the Multicultural Arts Leadership Initiative in San Jose. In the last nine years, she has served as a district arts leader in San Francisco and Elk Grove. She established the SFUSD Mariachi Program in its tenth year of existence. Dr. Fojas is the Arts Coordinator for the Santa Clara County Office of Education, where she supports arts education in the schools and builds connections to arts and culture organizations in the region. Ms. Fojas has served on the board of the California Music Educators’ Association, the California chapter of the American String Teachers’ Association, the California Alliance for Arts Education, and the National Guild of Community Arts Education. Dr. Fojas still performs as a violinist and violist in local ensembles and continues to champion mariachi education in the region.

Yukie Fujimoto is a dance educator, arts advocate, choreographer and a mother of three who is greatly invested in social justice issues. She was a senior company member with ODC/Dance and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at Mills College, Oakland. She is the Founder of ALL THE RIGHT MOVES, a dance program that offers free dance classes to members of the Boys & Girls Club of Oakland, CA, and Co-founder of Art Moves Project, a nonprofit arts organization that commissions artists for public art installations in Lafayette, CA. Currently, she serves on the Lafayette Public Art Committee, the Lafayette Superintendent Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) Committee, Lafayette Superintendent Arts Advisory Committee and Co-Chair of Campolindo High School DEIB Committee.

Rosalina is a former professional dancer and leads an educational dance non-profit. As a Luna professional learning alum and member of Luna’s network, she experienced first-hand the positive impact that Luna programs have on teachers and thereby thousands of students.  She credits Luna for helping her nurture her student’s unique expression and voice through dance.   Thanks to Luna she has also developed professional development programs for teachers and community centers from Santa Barbara to Santa Maria, impacting 20,000+ children.

A Bay Area native, Tatiana studied dance as a youth, and is a Sunday school teacher at an Episcopal church in San Francisco. She leads JLL’s Northern California Land & Development Site transactions practice which focuses on transactions of sites undergoing a change in use, ranging from urban infill sites to industrial sites to new master planned communities. She has worked for the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Economics and Workforce Development on large-scale redevelopment projects. Tatiana received her MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and her Bachelor of Arts from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she majored in Public Policy and minored in French & Chinese.

Prior to joining the Childcare Resource Center LaWanda served as Oakland Unified School District’s Director of Quality Enhancement and Professional Development of Early Education from June 2018 to January 2022, where she supported a cadre of 200-plus dynamic educators and a dedicated early learning leadership team. She helped to form a policy coalition, Black Californians United for Early Care and Education that centers a 10 Point Plan for children, families, and the workforce. Dr. Wesley also co-directed a statewide leadership fellowship titled the California Consortium for Equity in Early Childhood Education Fellowship and was the Co-Founder and Co-Director for the Center for Equity in Early Childhood Education (CEECE) in service of disrupting race inequities at its root cause. This organization effective September 2022 transitioned to Black Women in Early Childhood Collective where she is also a member. As of January 2021, Wesley was voted and appointed to the California-Hawaii NAACP State Executive Committee as the Community Coordinator Chair, and in October 2022 was also appointed as Education Chair. She was selected by the National Black Child Development Institute as one of 14 Policy Fellows across the country for the 2021-2023 cohort. To date, Dr. Wesley continues to advocate and remain in service to children and families most impacted by historical and structural oppression, and yet are most at-promise.

In her dual role as executive director and faculty of Luna’s Professional Learning program Nancy has firsthand experience with teaching artists’ needs throughout California. Her work facilitating workshops and coaching teaching artists, teachers, and social service workers informs her responsibilities as an administrator. She is the former co-director and choreographer of San Francisco’s Asian American Dance Performances where she directed outreach programs and choreographed dances that delved into Asian stereotypes, immigration and racism. Nancy served as the sole non-governmental teaching artist on the department of education’s advisory committees to revise the TK-12 California Arts Standards and Frameworks. She is a past president of the California Dance Education Association’s and serves on the National Guild of Community Arts Education board of trustees as co-chair of their Racial Equity committee.